The Osteoporosis Drug You Never Heard About

Vivian Goldschmidt, MA Drugs

Evidence-Based
4 min Read
osteoporosis aspirin

Five years ago, a study showed that a common, cheap, over-the-counter drug helps maintain bone density.

So why didn’t this news make major headlines?

After all, this should be excellent news to the Medical Establishment, since they believe that osteoporosis is a disease that must be treated with drugs. How is it that a readily available over-the-counter drug that apparently does the trick is not heralded as the ultimate solution to osteoporosis?

How come the medical associations and the United Nations, so “concerned” about the threat of the current osteoporosis “epidemics” are not shouting this news from the rooftops? Today, I’ll give you the answer to these questions.

Aspirin: the Cheapest Osteoporosis Drug

Aspirin – or aspirin’s precursor – is a very old drug. It is derived from a compound found in the bark of the willow tree, salicylic acid. Chemically altered into acetylsalicylic acid in 1853, and then manufactured and sold by the Bayer Corporation in 1899, aspirin was the “go to” drug for the next five decades.

But it was a mere five years ago, in 2008, that a study1 showed that aspirin helps maintain bone density.

“This latest study identifies aspirin's medicinal role on two fronts. In mice, the drug appears to prevent both improper bone resorption and the death of bone-forming stem cells.”1

When aspirin was given to mice, it apparently prevented imbalanced or improper bone resorption and also prevented the death of stem cells that form bone.

“We've shown how aspirin both inhibits bone resorption and promotes osteoblast formation,”1 said Associate Professor Songtao Shi and Research Associate Takayoshi Yamaza.

So Should I Take Aspirin?

Of course not! The Osteoporosis Reversal Program is dedicated to researching and implementing drug-free ways to maintain and increase bone density; it does not promote or advocate drugs of any kind. I do not even recommend aspirin for pain – but more on that below. Right now we need to figure out why Big Pharma didn’t (and still doesn’t) want this information disseminated.

There’s No Money in Aspirin

As usual, it comes down to the dollar with Big Pharma. You see, aspirin is not a new drug that can be patented and sold for large sums of money. There’s just no profit in aspirin.

This underscores the fact that Big Pharma is just in it for the huge profits only possible with new (and patentable) drugs. Big Pharma would rather continue researching and producing exorbitantly expensive drugs so they can keep their monopoly.

Aspirin Hurts More Than Helps

While the study showed that a regular aspirin regimen increases bone density, that does not mean that aspirin is good for your body. As many of you already know, osteoporosis drugs of any sort can appear to “work,” increasing bone density and so forth; but there’s always a price to pay.

Aspirin and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in general harm the body and, ultimately, your bones. They impair the body’s ability to heal fractures by stopping an important aspect of healing at the site of injury: inflammation. Chronic inflammation is definitely harmful to bones, but the initial inflammation like swelling and redness at the site of a fracture are important components of the healing process. And like all synthetic drugs, NSAIDs are acidifying.

Aspirin and other NSAIDs can also cause severe stomach irritation. And a European study from 2012 shows that aspirin therapy increases your risk of vision loss in the form of wet macular degeneration.

So it just doesn’t make any sense to take aspirin or any drug to manage conditions like osteoporosis or to prevent heart attack.

Here’s to your pain-free life without taking drugs!

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References

1 Yamaza T, Miura Y, Bi Y, Liu Y, Akiyama K, et al. “Pharmacologic Stem Cell Based Intervention as a New Approach to Osteoporosis Treatment in Rodents.” PLoS One, 3(7): e2615 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002615